The Sea of Annihilation stayed silent for twelve days.
Over those twelve days, Echoing City grew like crazy.
The bell tower square went from three hundred people to twelve hundred. Three more carts joined Uncle Teuchi's ramen cart-one from Sunagakure, one from the Land of Iron, while a group of fishermen from the Land of Waves simply set up a fish market in the east of the city. It opened before dawn every day, and their shouted prices could make the tower bell echo. Soundless formally took Mingchen on as his "bell ringer." He worked morning and evening shifts, progressing from the third phrase to the complete seventh phrase, drawing each comma out longer than the last. Ibiki Morino of the Anbu upgraded the frequency-powered electrical system twice more. The bell tower could now run continuously for a hundred and twenty hours, and even had air conditioning-he had added that himself, saying, "Night shifts are too cold."
Serina had not been idle either. She copied every passage about the "Wind-Guiding Melody" from Jiraiya's notes seven times, placing the commas differently in each version. Then she had Mingchen play them all on his piccolo and recorded them onto cassettes. What she wanted was not "a song," but "an entire library of commas she could call on at any time."
On the twelfth night, she was on duty at the top of the bell tower.
The moon was beautiful. Echoing City's night sky was brighter than the one over Peace River Town-perhaps because the city had only just been flipped right-side up, and golden lines like cracks still lingered overhead. Moonlight leaked through them, draping the square in a thin veil.
She leaned against the railing, twirling the Steel Ruler in her hand. The Golden Light Meridians in her left shoulder pulsed